Network service insertion, also referred to as service insertion, generally refers to insertion of a network service provided by a service entity into a flow of traffic in a network. A flow of traffic may refer to data packets that traverse a particular route in the network and match particular flow rules. Service entity can refer to any computing system that can execute applications to provide network services. Various applications, such as load balancers, firewalls, intrusion prevention systems (IPS), intrusion detection systems (IDS), web filtering, domain name system (DNS) filtering, and the like, may be inserted as a network service by the service entity.